Colors of Jazz - Artwork by Harold Smith

Jazz begins with the blues – not just the bent notes and field hollers, but the colors themselves. Blue is the primary visual motif of traditional Black music, from Ma Rainey and Leadbelly to Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and John Coltrane. Just think of the titles: Good Morning Blues. Mood Indigo. Kind of Blue. Blue Note, Blue Train, Blue Monk; a multitude of aural experiences rendered in vivid, ecstatic color.

But blue isn’t the only color of jazz. Listen closely, and you’ll see a world saturated with innumerable shades and hues. There are the red lights of Storyville, where Louis first heard the sound he would come to define; the “Black-and-Tans” of Harlem where races mixed and Duke practiced his own musical alchemy; the green and yellow basket Ella swung at the Apollo. Not all of the colors are bright, of course. Bird is only the most famous example of an artist whose taste for “brown sugar” and her white cousins led to an early grave; and the very real horrors of racism, immortalized in Billie’s “Strange Fruit,” are as dark – literally and figuratively – as they come. But this, too, makes a kind of sense. How else to represent the history of a people that has been defined more than any other by color, if not with color itself? Or, in the words of Andy Razaf and Fats Waller, “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?”

Black and Blue take on a special significance in the work of Harold Smith. His paintings certainly represent Black experiences, but they do so with very little use of the shade of black itself. More often than not, blue takes black’s place as the shadow, the base or background. This is not without implication. In science, Black is defined as the absence of color: a void where no light is reflected, against which other colors inevitably take precedence. But the subjects of Smith’s work are anything but a void. Just as Black music expresses a range of moods far richer than mere darkness and despair, Smith represents Black lives as awash in color: blues, yes, but also reds, browns, yellows, greens, and purples. These are expressions of a cultural tradition that is vibrant precisely because of its diversity – because of its color. As such, color is both celebrated and transcended. There is as much of Matisse here as of Africa, and vice versa. And the range of colors expressed is as broad and diverse as the sum total of American life and American music.

We at the American Jazz Museum are thrilled to be a part of this exhibit, this celebration of our shared cultural spectrum: from Bearden to Basquiat, from Bebop to Hip-Hop; reaching forward not just to the Monks and the Coltranes, but also to the Herbie Hancocks, the Bobby Watsons, the Terence Blanchards and Joshua Redmans, the J Dillas and Jay-Zs and Bilals and Janelle Monaés. And so we have endeavored to represent as many facets of that spectrum as possible, through a synaesthetic intersection of still paintings, moving images, and written poetry. But whether you’re seeing it, hearing it or reading it, ultimately, it’s all color. These are the Colors of Jazz, and they’re ours.

Zachary Hoskins
American Jazz Museum
March 2011